This is the letter I sent to Our SC Senators and Henry Brown.

TO Senators, Graham, DeMint and House Representative Henry Brown:

South Carolina is embarking on some major road building projects. The multi-billion dollar northern and southern sections of the I-73 Corridor, which will be bringing a much needed access to the Grand Strand providing much needed jobs in the short term. By opening an access to the beach will increase the tourists, stimulating our beach business, providing longer term jobs and providing incentives for major business relocation to our area.    

According to Senator Lindsey Graham the I-73 Corridor Project would not be included in the so called “investment plan” which the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office’s (CBO) just released study, projects that more than half of the hundreds of billions of dollars in spending on infrastructure in the economic stimulus package -- such as $26 billion of the $30 billion allocated for highways and $15.5 billion of the $18.5 billion for renewable energy projects -- won’t occur for more than two years.

It is amazing to me that there is money in this package for a vast array of other projects which won’t provide any jobs, as you guys in Washington have pointed out.  

In other words, the massive stimulus package is going to waste record amounts of money, won’t provide an immediate stimulus for the economy, and will only add to our nation’s soaring liabilities.

I will not support anybody who votes for this debacle, allowing a long term debt which will not be paid off by any one who is living today.

I know we don’t have a chance of stopping this massive snowball on its journey through the all knowing elite halls of our Congress but please try to get the 45% in tax cuts which the Republicans have asked the President for and please, all of you, put a statement in the SC papers so we will all know your positions.

Commenting on the passage of the $825 billion Stimulus package:

Today the massive snowball mention in the letter above was passed in the House and to my surprise every Republican voted NO. This is what the Conservative movement wanted. Why did we want this you ask?  Simply, the Republicans were, by the Democrats instituting a house rule, left out of the debate on the bill.

The Democrats thought they would try to lure the Republicans in to voting for the package by putting some really stupid spending PORK in the bill. They new the Republicans were going directly to the President and tell them their ideas and would most certainly point these as examples of the spending they were against. The Republicans did point them out as reasons for not voting, knowing what the Democrats were up to, for the package, but also gave the President a much better plan that would stimulate the economy within months of the bill’s passing at half the price.

Since the President didn’t want the give Republicans authorship of any portion of the package he told them he would have the house pull the “stupid PORK” out of the package so they could tell the folks back home that they had a part in the shaping of the bill.

The one thing they would not pull from the package was the provision that would provide up to a whopping $5.2 billion for ACORN, the left-leaning nonprofit group under federal investigation for massive voter and voter registration fraud.

1. Cut the lowest two income tax rates for 2009 and 2010, from 15 percent to 10 percent and from 10 percent to 5 percent.
2. Extend through 2010 a patch to the Alternative Minimum Tax, which was originally designed to ensure that wealthy people pay taxes, but instead would hit millions of middle-income families with higher taxes.
3.  Expand the $7,500 first-time homebuyers tax credit, for a principal residence, to all homebuyers while limiting it to purchasers who can make a down payment of at least 5 percent of the purchase price.
4.  Provide a tax deduction for small businesses with less than 500 employees equal to 20 percent of their income.
5.  Offer new tax deduction for those who do not receive tax-preferred, employer-sponsored health care coverage. And provide assistance to the unemployed who do not qualify for a COBRA premium subsidy.
6.  Give tax exemption on unemployment benefits and extend temporary federal unemployment benefits through 2009, phasing it out through mid-2010.
7.  Allow companies to write off current losses against previous tax years for up to five years. Companies now can only "carry back" losses for two years. The tax break would not be available to banks and other companies receiving help from the $700 billion bailout package.
8.  Extend through 2009 a break for small businesses that allows them to immediately write off up certain capital expenditures.

 The cost of their proposal is approximately $478 billion.

The Republicans in as much said that if, the President feels that he and the Democrats have the ultimate plan, they should go it alone. The House Republicans put their Conservative principles on the line and if the plan works the Republican Party would be ruined for another 40 years. On the other hand if it doesn’t, which it won’t, the conservative Republicans will be back in four years and they had better not screw it up like they did before.

Let’s see if the Republican Senators will have the gravitas to do the same.

James Clyburn wants the new stimulus lending package distributed to the U.S. House Representative’s Districts, bypassing the State Governor’s office, and he (Clyburn, who is black) decided the way to do it was to play the race card by associating Governor Sanford family’s ownership of a Plantation.    

Clyburn, the highest-ranking black lawmaker in the House, is the King of the earmarks, in South Carolina, and keeps most of his family’s employers in business with our earmarked money, as was highlighted in a Sun News article by David Wren on Aug. 9, 2007.

Simply put Clyburn has been told by President Obama that he will accept no more earmarks and Clyburn is starting to panic. This means he can’t ride around in his big car which is supported by the taxpayer’s money, through the $160,000 salary he gets, and hand out earmarked checks supplying his “Plantation” with their “daily bread”.

Clyburn forgets that a large population of slaves were owned by and worked on Plantations owned by Black Plantation Owners in or near his Sixth District. “People who live in glass houses should not throw stones”.

This new $800 million stimulus plan, or “daily bread”, has enough pork (earmarks) in its detail and that is what Clyburn has his eyes on but at least this pork (now being called requested bailouts) is getting debated in Congress. Clyburn knows he can only keep control of his “Plantation” by getting the pork sent directly to him so he can play the “Big Hoss” role.

Even though I am against this legislation I am in favor of a system that allows for the Governors to be the only ones in their State to request money from the Federal Government, and spend that money on projects which are state wide. The requested money should fit within the spending appropriations bills that are debated in Congress. Earmarks are not debated and slipped into the bill after the House committee approves the approbations and before the total House votes, by the District Representatives.       

It is unfortunate that Speaker, Nancy Polosi, has seen fit only to allow the Republicans to submit proposals which will be judged, not debated. She is also seeking more than the $800 billion, now being requested.       

Many States, including South Carolina, are running out of money to pay unemployment benefits. Governor Sanford states in the Op-Ed he wrote on Dec. 30, 2008 that he would not request additional Federal money until he received confirmation that an independent audit would be done on the operations of the Employment Security Commission (ECS).

This just one of the many reforms the Governor has asked for during his admistration and apparently falling on the deaf ears of the Budget and Control Board (BCB), which in my opinion should be abolished

I believe a procedural and operational audit of the (ECS) should be done for the short term but also a complete reengineering of the entire business model, including the 158 different agencies, of all the processes currently employed from the Governor’s office on down the chain of responsibilities.

Now to be realistic about this, the problems we now face have been of a crisis nature and have been willfully over looked, by all levels of Government from the President of the United States on down, to recognize this crisis as the equal of a Chapter 11 Bankruptcy.

Only just recently the Congressional Budget Office said that the federal insolvency crisis is so deep every U.S. household would have to cough up half-a-million dollars each just to save the federal government from bankruptcy.

I have to thank my lucky stars I have never had to collect unemployment checks, so I can not relate to what it feels like to do so. I do know that the federal government created this debacle and is now not in any position to add to deficit problem by piling on more burden.

So guess what Congress does on June 12, 2008? The House passed the Emergency Extended Unemployment Compensation Act, H.R. 5749, by a vote of 274-137, a margin large enough to override a veto.

 H.R. 5749, the Emergency Extended Unemployment Compensation Act, will immediately provide up to 13 weeks of extended unemployment benefits in every state to workers exhausting the 26 weeks of regular unemployment benefits.

In states with higher levels of unemployment (six percent or higher) such as S.C., an additional 13 weeks would be available, for a total of 26 weeks of extended benefits. Relief would run through March 2009 and benefit 3.5 million Americans.  [Congressional Budget Office]

The Federal unemployment trust funds, which have more than enough reserves to cover the cost, will finance these benefits.

Governor Sanford really had no option but to request the money since we (S.C.) have the third highest unemployment (8.3%) in the nation and have been paying out more benefit money than we have been taking in for a long time. We have previously borrowed about $14 million to keep up. Remember the key words in the statement above are that the Feds will finance these benefits, meaning loans that have to be paid back.

The way state unemployment moneys get into the State fund is from employers paying into it. Since they (the employers) are not paying enough to keep up with exploding demand they will have to pay more into the fund. South Carolina businesses now pay one of the highest unemployment insurance rates and with this new extension burden their rates will have to be at least doubled to pay off the Federal loan as well as fill up the State’s coffers.      

The businesses owners will then get caught up in a vicious life threatening position leading to a decision off either laying people off or shuttering their businesses. As you can see this becomes a vicious circle.   

President Elect Obama said recently that his stimulus plan would cost a trillion dollars over the next two years hereby adding to the inherited deficit of $1.2 trillion. This he said will save or add 4 million jobs of which 600,000 would be in the public sector, meaning on a government payroll.

The Wall Street Journal stated that when this latest round of bailouts and the spending that Obama is talking up is finalized, the federal government will be sucking out 28 cents of every dollar produced in the American economy.

This stimulus plan will make the vicious circle’s circumference much, much wider. All these jobs in the public sector are being created through massive Federal loans where as these jobs will eventually go away if not paid back and if the objective is not met of putting money back in the coffers of the State and Federal governments, the impact of “these unemployed workers” will result in a massive tax increase on everything we can possibly think of, and some that we can’t.

This plan is like a financial advisor telling me, with a credit card debt of $10,000, to go ahead and spend $20,000 more and that will fix my problem.

This new Obama plan should not be approved as a panacea for all. The targets should be very clear and specific. There are two areas of national security importance that should have the very highest priorities, and they are:

1. The hardening of our bridges, upgrading and repairing our roads and transportation systems.
2. And a massive up grade to our power grid and communications systems.     

These two things alone should provide about two thirds of the 600,000 jobs and since many of the States have plans already in place, at least in the infrastructure area waiting for money to start, we should see some near term positive impacts.

The I-73 could be the first to get started. The State should get away form their not invented here syndrome and explore some innovated design and build methods such as the type used by the State of Texas.  

The power projects will take some major design time, so let’s hope some are already on the drawing boards, which could mean building a parallel grid and phasing in the customers and suppliers from the old one over many years.

The U.S.A. becoming as near to energy independent as possible should be the next priority, which means the first two priorities will have to be ready to facilitate all the new alternative methods of power and fuel generation along with the old ones.    

These stimulus packages will never be paid off in our lifetime or for that matter our Great, Great Grandchildren’s and I believe it will only lead to a massive tax increase in the years to come. Since the taxpayer we will not have any say in this matter, remember we were against the UAW bailout by 85% and the TARP by 73% but that didn’t stop the President from signing up, so Governor Sanford might just as well take some of the money.